Thoughts become things? 4. The world of Macro-Micro.

I remember reading Gulliver’s Travels with curiosity when I was young. In the country of giants, everything in the world was dozens of times larger than in Gulliver’s hometown, and in the country of dwarfs, it was the opposite.

The microworld is the world of cells, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles that require observation tools such as a microscope, and the macro world includes dust, grains of sand, stones, Earth, the moon, the sun, the galaxy, and the universe that can be seen with the naked eye.

A person is made up of about 60 trillion cells, and cells are made up of 100 trillion atoms. However, 99.999% of those atoms are almost empty. It is said that in the world of elementary particles or quantum, which is a world smaller than atoms, there exists something like a faint flow of energy that is neither here nor there or exists at the same time. The core theory of quantum physics is that human will affects the movement and properties of atoms, ultimately causing changes in matter that we can detect with the naked eye. It is a microscopic world that is invisible to the eye.

Conversely, the solar system that Earth belongs to belongs to our galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars. The macroscopic world that has been discovered so far shows that the universe is more than 100 billion such galaxies, or that it is much more massive than that.

Just as natural phenomena and human ways of thinking were the same in the giants and dwarfs that Gulliver traveled to, the principles that can be applied to electrons orbiting protons and the earth orbiting the sun are essentially the same. The scale is either large or small. Just as a human being performs a certain role in society or a family, the cells or organs of the human body (five organs and six parts such as the liver and heart) also perform certain roles and functions. Whether in the macro world or the micro world, the natural laws that must be observed still exist and the roles that must be performed are still the same. In the visible macroscopic world, there is creation and extinction, or birth and death, but in the microscopic world, it is just a repetition of the gathering and dispersion of elementary particles.

If the emotions of joy and sorrow, learned information, and past memories are removed from me, what will I claim as “me”? The moment I recognize the existence of “me,” standing alone in a corner of the gigantic universe, the endless macroscopic world, I feel like there is no need to be so selfish. When I look at myself microscopically again, I see a universe-like world unfolding within me again, and I naturally get the feeling that all creation is one.

If you step away from everyday life for a moment and appreciate the macro or micro world, you will realize that there is nothing to be so sad, happy, or angry. In fact, there is nothing that cannot be forgiven and there is no feeling of resentment. This may be because we are essentially one.

Dr. Jin-man Kim, director of Peace Oriental Clinic